Month: July 2017

We’ve all been there. The person across the table from you is paying far more attention to their phone than they are to you, Even though they’re supposed to be there to talk with you.

We are becoming slaves to our technology… Some would say the ship has sailed.

This fact crashed through my ability to ignore it, in a major way a couple of days ago while I was having my hair cut. 

Yep, the barber was texting while he was cutting my hair. Uh excuse me? I’m paying for 30 minutes of your time. The expectation is that I’m going to get 30 uninterrupted minutes.  Surely the person at the other end of that conversation knows you’re at work, and what you do for a living.

Needless to say I will not be going back to that shop.

This got me thinking about some boundaries that we should start observing.

1. If you’re with people in the real world, pay attention to the people you’re with, not the phone. Try silent or do not disturb mode.
2. If you’re texting with someone, finish that conversation, before you join the conversation with a group of real people
3. If your phone rings while you’re with friends, and you must take the call, it’s your children, your mom or whoever, excuse yourself and step away, or out of the building to have your conversation. Keep the conversation brief.
4. If it’s a call you don’t have to take, Send it to voicemail. You can do that by discretely pressing a power, or volume down button.
5. If you’re Skyping with someone, the rest of us don’t want to be involved in your conversation. So, stop screaming into you phone. By the way, that also includes not turning up the volume to drown out the crowd around you.

You have voicemail on your phone, USE IT!

Imagine a world where we turned on our phones only when we were intending to use them. No more annoying ringtones in public places, people actually speaking to other people on the street (Gasp). No more people walking into fountains, or open elevator shafts, or manholes.

What a concept!

Imagine having sex and not hearing the insistent buzz, ding, chirp of your cellphone demanding your attention. After all are you going to accept a Skype call while you’re nailing someone to the sheets? Do you really need to share that?

If you get someone’s voicemail leave a damn message! After leaving a message, how about waiting an hour or two before sending text messages, or emails, to find out if the other person got your voicemail.

You might also consider setting up a list of preferred people that will have the ability to ring through your do not disturb setting. Like your kids, your mom, and your spouse. I’ve done that and exactly four people have that privilege. They’ll get through first try, anyone not on that list will go to voicemail.

Headhunters, placement agents, etc… 

YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED to call, hang-up, call, hang-up, and call, hang-up trying to bust through the DND setting. Nothing you have to say to me isn’t going to wait an hour. If you’re one of those people and have tried that with my number, I can tell you you’ve been blocked. I have no desire to speak with you.

Just because we live in a mostly connected world, doesn’t mean that we’re supposed to be available to everyone all the time.

Try this as an experiment sometime. Turn your phone off while you’re driving somewhere. I’ll bet you get to your destination less stressed.

I guess I’m just an old guy. 

I like the convenience of the technology, but I refuse to become a slave to it.

If you try to call me and get no answer, it’s nothing personal. I just prefer living my  life in the real world, I’m not quite ready to join The Matrix just yet. 

If you are offended by me not answering your call, just imagine that I’m naked with someone!

That image alone should make you hesitant to call me at least for a couple of hours.

So secure that even I (the intended recipient can’t get it….

My insurance company sent me a message saying that there were messages waiting on their site.

There’s a link. It’s valid, and does in fact link to their web site.

I click on the link, and it takes me to a page that asks me to create a password to view my messages. I create a password. Then I get five emails in my normal email, each of them contains a PDF that is encrypted. I figure out that the password I just created in fact will open these PDFS. 

I enter the password and find that each of the PDFs says the same thing. NOTHING.

In the mean time, the password has reset ALL my passwords on for the insurance company and since I had their application running on my phone when the password reset happened. That counted as an invalid attempt to access the account. Then I try to acces the account from their web site to see if I can read the messages they wanted me to read…  BOOM, now I’m locked out. 

I tried to reset my password again… NOPE! Too many accesses within too short a time…

I still don’t have the messages that they wanted to send me.

I call my agent. They don’t have any idea what the company is trying to reach me about. I ask my agent to tell the company I’m not going to use their web site anymore. I want every communication on paper, mailed to me with a stamp. 

I’ve spent over an hour trying to get this all so important message from the company and honestly… I’ve lost my desire to worry about it. They can wait for me to get the information on paper via USPS. 

Technology is supposed to make this kind of thing easier, not harder.

The really annoying thing is that I have several encryption keys. The insurance company could have simply accessed one of the public keys, encrypted the message and sent it securely to my email where I could have conveniently read my message. 

All of this pissing around with their kludge “security” has done nothing but annoy the hell out of me. It’s screwed up the account for me and my other half and now I’ll have to spend yet more time (probably hours) unfucking this fuckup.

Grrrrr!

At the end of last year, the company moved our department into a building that was still under construction. Throughout the winter months my department was like a set of “The Walking Dead“. We had people blowing through their sick time like it was candy. (Myself included.) Around the beginning of the year we had people coming in with various flus, walking pneumonia, colds, and sinus infections. Which they passed around freely. So most of us have little to no sick time left.  (Myself included)

So a month ago I had and accident.  Annoying, totaled my car, and required me to take a day off with more time off to lick my wounds, and get myself right again.

If I worked for a “normal” company, since I have plenty of vacation time on the books, I’d be able to simply use vacation time on request to take care of medical issues and any therapy I needed. I’d go to work and do my best to schedule time so as not to disrupt the business and there’d be nothing said about it.

However, I don’t work for a “normal” company. I work for a company that has instituted this crazy system of penalizing you if you take a day off without prior management approval. Even with this system in place there is a loophole that will allow you to deal with emergencies, (Or car accidents) without penalty. The problem is, that your manager has it at their discretion to enforce the penalties, OR NOT. 

I happen to work for one of the ones that refuses to exercise that discretion. My manager is one of the rule bound ones.

Which leads me to the situation I’m in now.

In order to be able to make appointments, and not be penalized for doing it. The company makes you go to a government agency.  That Agency contacts your Dr., your Dr. fills out a bunch of forms, which he / or she sends back to the government agency, then they determine if you’re worthy.

After their determination they send the forms back to the company. And all the penalties magically disappear and you then have permission to miss work to go take care of your health.

In other words it’s an overly complex mess that should be handled between the employer and employee. Then again… you have to keep bureaucrats busy don’t you?

Well in my case, the Dr circled the wrong box on one page, and this morning, I got a call from HR telling me that I shouldn’t be at work because I was on continuous leave.

This is what happens when you abdicate responsibility.

Not that I’m complaining, I need some down time. Even a day or two will be more than fine. Just so long as I don’t feel like I’m running to beat the clock, punch the clock, be on schedule, or dance to someone else’s tune.

In other words, I’m going to have a drink, go to bed, and have nothing planned for tomorrow. That will be a nice change after weeks of running to the NEXT thing.  Hell, I may even turn the phone off.